The Province from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 160

8 The Magazine June 15,1986 at m. I A ship wrec work as hard and sailed as Dustship Glory launches its author into the front ranks of Canada's most remarkable fic-tion-makers. Alan Twlgg it Vancouver freelance writer. "There is a Canadian tendency to neutralize, to break things down. The German word for that is Ernuchtern: to trivialize with sobering detail.

Dedicated to Schroeder's strict Mennonite father on the raine ALAN TWIGG Ridiculed by his neighbors, the stubborn mechanical genius moved his ship four miles in three years. He died a schizophrenic cata et on the Prairies, pub lished in Ontario and AUSTRALIA written by a British DSMCVi "gW" i if tonic in 1943, leaving the relic of his Quixotic efforts marooned on the bald prairie. Half a cen-turv later FLORIDA virtually full-blown every writer's fondest fantasy having only to set pen to paper and take dictation." In fact, Schroeder's research into the thoroughly eccentric character of Tom Sukanen, including a stint living on the loner's property, only uncovered countless local rumors and contradictions. Trained as a surrealist at the University of B.C.'s creative writing department in the '60s, Schroeder decided to expand an already bizarre story into the realm of myth. The result, Dustship Glory, is an unforgettable novel, one that ultimately respects Tom Sukanen's dogged yet sublime foolishness.

Did Sukanen really design a wife-beating machine? Did he survive on horsemeat and grasshoppers? And believe that radio was a government plot to hypnotize the populace? Did he really wear home-made dentures that dripped blood? Yes and no. Schroeder refuses to separate facts from fiction. 1 Columbian, Dustship Glory (Doubleday, $19.95) has all the markings of the major new Canadian novel of the spring. Andreas Schroeder, of Mission, B.C., has revived the remarkable struggles and dreams of Tom Sukanen, a dirt-poor Finnish-Canadian who endured seven years of gruelling toil during the Depression to singlehandedly build an oceangoing, dust-bowl freighter in Saskatchewan. Almost 25 kilometres from the closest river, and 1,653 km from salt water, Sukanen then began to haul his ark, the Sontianen (a Finnish word for dung beetle), with a plough horse and winch.

Province Sales Carriers Have Been Schroeder Andreas Schroeder was driving toward Moose Jaw at sunset when he spotted the subject for his next novel standing upright in a fallow wheat field. Like a Canadian pyramid, puzzling and magnificent. "Every storytelling gene in my body immediately stood to attention," he recalls. "I thought I might have run into a story i There! ngway: The last load from the lode rnest Hemingway's latest posthumous book, The Garden of Eden (Collier Mac-Imillan with its theme of bisexu- Jenks, who edited the Hemingway manuscript down to 247 pages and 30 chapters. The Garden of Eden is more cohesive than Islands in the Stream but lacks that novel's complexity and depth, and it does not have the clarity of The Nick Adams Stories.

Add to that a tentative handling of bisexuality and a plodding narative, and the novel emerges as the least impressive of the three posthumous works of fiction. It was written between 1946 and 1961 the year the 61-year-old Hemingway put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. The Garden of Eden describes a love triangle involving David Bourne, a successful American writer, his wife of three weeks, Catherine, and a woman they meet during their honeymoon along the southern coasts of France and Spain in the 1920s. Readers who expect major Hemingway themes such as masculine courage and stoic survival will be disappointed. But Hemingway fans will enjoy the little signatures throughout.

The detailed descriptions of landscape, the attention paid to food, drink and other physical pleasures and David Bourne's compulsion to work all are unmistakably Hemingway. Associated Pre if If ality, is evidence that the lode of unpublished Hemingway works is about played out. It is the 10th posthumous Hemingway book, and Charles Scribner's Sons, the publisher, describes it as the "last unpublished major work" by the Nobel Prize-winning author who committed suicide a quarter-century ago. Like the two other posthumous works of fiction by Hemingway Islands in the Stream in 1970 and The Nick Adams Stories in 1972 The Garden of Eden will raise questions about the propriety of editing unfinished literary work without an author's co-operation. "I'd like to think that if Hemingway had lived, he would have made the same sorts of decisions that ultimately I made," said Scribner's Tom For information regarding a Province newspaper route and how you might earn cash, trips and prizes El Zh Cosby on kids CALL If fel (1) ny fan of Bill Cosby will enjoy his book two people in love can commit.

Having had five qualifies me to write this book but not to give any absolute rules because there are none." The book is full of anecdotes about the Cosby family, including a lesson he taught to his son about lying. After hitting his son and saying he would never hit him again, he hit him again, saying: "I'm sorry; I lied. Do you ever want me to lie to you United Press International Fatherhood, (Doubleday, It's like rm along with one of his stand-up i 11 HU routines. And Cosby certainly knows his subject. As he says in the book: "Yes, having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that You Just Can't Wait.